


i always promised i'd follow

by 264feet



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Genocide route didn't happen, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, POV Second Person, Past Abuse, Post-Undertale Pacifist Route, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 16:45:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10391301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/264feet/pseuds/264feet
Summary: One day, Frisk doesn't wake up in their body. But someone else does.For several weeks, nobody is there to be Frisk. But somebody has to.





	

**Author's Note:**

> (Updated 4/4/18: fixed confusing statements and grammar)

It's after a short sleep of three weeks that you awake. The firstsense that returns is smell: chemical cleaners burn your nose almost as bad as they do your parched throat. You always had an acute sense of smell, and it doesn't take you long to recover from the onslaught of sterilization to smell what either is sweat or tears and likely may be both.

The second that returns is hearing-- not because of the ECG beeping in rhythm with your heart pounding like drums in your ears, not from the subtle chirp of birds that you last heard falling rapidly towards what you thought would be your death after climbing Mt Ebott, but because everyone has crowded around you and everything is a clamor of voices.  
  
"...awake!" someone says. "Finally awake!"  
  
"... knew you could do it..." "... back to us..." "... hear us, Frisk?"  
  
It's only on the last word that your eyes shoot open and your vision focuses in. Your eyes are torn between the regular world and a world one layer beyond; you feel as if you've fallen again from one to the other, but you aren't sure in which direction.  
  
You take careful note on your surroundings to get your bearings: two skeletons, one of which is trying to hide the fact he's crying; a golden flower in a vase full of water, and it has no distinct features, but your heart jumps at its sight anyway; the scientist and her girlfriend, holding hands;  a white cabinet with a lock on it; some TV screens with readings you don't understand and one flickering the same images of a meaningless mute talk show on repeat. It's a tidy little moment, all packaged and wrapped up for you as a gift for your awakening.  
  
And also, your parents. You haven't spoken with them in so long, not since you fell down. They stand out in the room, the only two of their kind. You had resigned yourself to never seeing them again; you placed your love and grief alone at a bus stop with a blank check and no destination.  
  
So why were they here now with these other people?  
  
"Human! I mean... Frisk?" says the one you know as Papyrus. "I was so stricken with grief and despair... at the idea you might not ever get to talk to a cool friend like me again!" he says, trying to recover as he sobs in the middle of his sentence. His brother doesn't look much better off, only giving a weak smile and a wave when you look in his direction.  
  
"Th-thank g-gosh," Alphys says. "You were... 'fallen down' f-for... s-so long, I didn't know wh-what to do... so I-I rushed you h-here."  
  
'Here' being a human hospital, you guess; it certainly isn't the Underground, you realize, noticing that the blinds are open and the sun is assaulting you with all its might. You try to recall the last thing that happened. You were vomiting blood and then simply dry heaving with your parched mouth once you had nothing left. Someone was at your bedside, holding your hand. You said you loved them.  
  
"Frisk, please speak to us if you can," says Dad, nervously.  
  
"Do not push them, Asgore!" Mom snaps, and you wonder if these are the same people you left behind for a moment. She takes a hand in her own. The hand she takes isn't yours, but you feel the warmth that encompasses it. "Frisk, my child, you have been asleep for just under a month. You were found one morning in your bed, completely unresponsive."  
  
'Frisk', 'Frisk', the word echoes in the fog of your mind but can't find its origin. It's like a distant lighthouse that never seems any nearer or futher, leaving you alone at the mercy of the gray tide. You wade waist-deep through the jumbles of misplaced memories and names and can only make out tufts of white fur and distant laughter, all swimming away from your fingertips as you reach toward them.  
  
"It is okay to take some time to get your bearings," she says. You yank your hand from hers; it hurts it hurts it hurts like you crawled up out of your grave, but at the same time, it does not hurt at all. She seems shocked, then disappointed- carving into you as if with a knife- but simply steps back into place next to Asgore and the others, and you are both Fine again. You consider the hand dully for one moment, then bend a finger, then stretch them all out. There's no doubt it's yours, but it feels like operating a marionette: you can make it move, but you feel no true attachment.  
  
You look over all of them, one by one, as dully as you would consider smudges on a sheet of paper-- which, sadly, is all they are to you. You feel as if you were only half-conscious when you met them and now you aren't sure what's dream and what's real. The one named Papyrus: you remember solving his puzzles and you remember him calling everyone together. The one that Mom called Asgore: you remember fighting for your life against him and you remember the day he adopted you and you flinched back from his hug and he vowed to never harm a hair on your head. None of it adds quite up, and the only one who seems to sense the lack of recognition in your eye is the shorter skeleton.  
  
But you are two of a kind. Because neither of you, despite your mutual doubts, say a word.  
  
"... maybe we should let 'em take it easy. the doctor should know they woke up," Sans finally says, his voice uneasy.  
  
Your voice returns to you last, and it always did have the most potential for harm, far more than your (smaller, oddly tan) fists or your (sharp, now monolidded) red eyes. Chains drag in your throat with every word as they escape the cage inside of you, one you had resigned yourself to long ago.  
  
You ask, and you say it so simply:  
  
"Where is Asriel?"  
  
And your Mom covers her mouth, and your father clutches her sleeve, and the scientist and the ex-guardswoman are exchanging worried glances and Papyrus is raising his brow in surprise. But Sans's eyes are just trained on you like you're a masterpiece that suddenly was one brushstroke short. If you could speak to him then, you'd tell him you were never a masterpiece but a symbolic piece composed of petals and blood that you hadn't even liked to look at since you were born.  
  
\---  
  
Every so-called advancement in modern medical science falls on its face when they say you have a normal pulse and are in perfect health. Unperturbed by this embarrassment, they claim you have made a full recovery and send you home the next day. The doctor gives Mom a list of symptoms to watch out for, but you are sure they don't include the ones you display: a sudden interest in golden flowers, an acute craving for chocolate, and random bouts of inconsolable depression.  
  
She hosts a giant family dinner in your honor and you're the only one who doesn't attend. She's knocking on the door to your room and you're hiding under the covers not to keep anyone out, but yourself in. The bus you left your heart upon has run its course and it all comes back to you at once: you are not yourself. You felt this confusion once, when they fell into the Underground the first time and you were lifted by your collar out of hell. But then, you had only followed them as if your soul were tethered to theirs; now, when you look at your hands, you see theirs-- as if you used them to grab that soul and rip their essence right out of their own body.    
  
It was in a strange state between death and life that you helped them on their journey through the Underground, and once they made good on your greatest regret, the two of you touched your souls one last time and you let yourself return to your rest. The world had finally let you go.  
  
But now here you were, dragged by your throat this time out of death.  
  
As you lay down that night, still in the same spot since the dinner, you close your eyes and say goodbye to the world again. You summon all your determination to reset, to start over, to drag that human named Frisk back the way they did to you.  
  
\---  
  
You wake up the next morning in the same world in the same bedroom in the same body and run into the bathroom and see another face look back and a part of you stares on in confusion as it starts to cry.  
  
_Despite everything,_ you think. But you don't finish the sentence.  
  
\---  
  
"Are you feeling well, Frisk?" asks Toriel-- you use that name now because she is not your mom anymore and you are not her child.  
  
As a means of avoiding her first name, which feels foreign for you to use, you have taken to not calling anyone by name at all. This is a perfect system, because Frisk has met many more people and you had long given up on remembering the names of humans as they usually had referred to you as 'idiot' or some variation of it. But when they see you- 'you', in quotation marks- they smile and wave and ask to play and dig up a fact you had long buried, that you had deep down wished it had been like this when you were still in your true body. But now you are not, and you claim to still feel 'weird', and they ask how long you might feel weird, and you have no answer to give.  
  
To Toriel, you give a big smile and a thumbs up as mechanically as you would enter numbers into a calculator, and the result is just as dull to you. She runs her fingers through their- your- hair and returns to her housework with a hum in her voice and a skip in her step. All the love toward Frisk simply connects but never absorbs, like oil and water-- you being the oil, stinky and dark and disgusting as you always were. You consider the knives in their pretty little knife rack, but the thought of turning the blade towards yourself feels a sin.  
  
After all, you realize, this is not your skin to harm.  
  
It disgusts you that your parents are so easily fooled by your act. You had once thought them the world, the sun and the moon, everything you had wanted in a family you had never received. But now they were two lonely people who were so desperate for validation that they both took time out of their day to see you but only looked at the parts they wanted to see.  
  
If anything, it drives off the existential dread to pretend to be them. It's little challenge; you spent so much time with them. What's harder is trying to figure out what happened since they came to the surface and you moved on. Their memories are inaccessible and they left no diary or photos. Papyrus asks if you remember their cool road trip in his new car and you simply nod your head and remember not to ask him again what that thing in the driveway is-- the surface isn't the same antiquated world you left behind. Alphys asks if you want help with your homework and you hold back from asking her if you go to school.  
  
Day by day, you keep their body clean and healthy in hopes that they will awaken but you will not. Day by day, you're greeted with the same overly-bright and disgustingly-hot sun that burns your flesh and hurts your eyes and illuminates the fact that you are never, ever getting out of this situation. And the sun, with all its radiance, and the sky, with its endlessness, and the clouds, with their distance from your dirty grip, all laugh down at you that this peace is not only wasted on Frisk, but on your brother, rotting underground with, presumably, your own corpse.  
  
\---  
  
Sans has a job that he goes to a few days a week, and you have memorized the times he leaves and returns. One day he hangs up his coat four minutes before he's due home, gives you a grin and asks if you remember where he works.  
  
"Of course," you say, because nobody expects much of you now-- and if you forget something, you can just say it was your little nap that still has you jumbled.  
  
"cool," he says, casual as always.  "remember how delicious you thought all the stuff there was?"  
  
You nod your head, even licking your lips to accentuate. Sans just chuckles, and if you know anything about laughter, it's that it doesn't always signify joy.  
  
"so you like to eat tires and motor oil? that's gross," he chuckles. His eyes for some reason look tired rather than amused. And you note from that day on that he for some reason fixes cars and other machinery, hard labor, as if he took the job just to test you.    
  
\---  
  
"Frisk, why don't you ever want to play anymore?" she asks.  
  
You only know her as 'she', or 'her' in some grammatical situations; you're sure you've heard her name by now, but you've grown so much more apathetic as of late that you're proud of yourself for returning to this school at all. You still feel an obligation to them to keep their life normal for whenever they may return- any day now, you write over and over again in the margins of your notes- but now your feet are sluggish on your daily commute there and you collapse into bed as soon as you get home. The surface changed the rules while you were gone and made every action thrice as difficult and you, the observant child you are, have no idea why or how.  
  
"Just tired," you say. She is putting her math book in her pink backpack. She zips it up with a satisfying sound and slings it around her shoulder. You realize, suddenly, that everyone else has left the classroom but the two of you; in the past, Frisk would do these things by themself.  
  
She knits her brows in concern and you feel a lump settle in your stomach. Outright hatred, apathy, physical violence, those beasts have tormented you your whole life. The wounds are as much a part of you as your arms or legs. But this new devil, kindness, doesn't belong with you any more than the smile you put on your face.  
  
"Sorry," you lie. "Really, it's no big deal! Just a lot of work to do, being an ambassador."  
  
"But you've been ignoring all of us, and... and you've done lots as ambassador. Monsters are in our class now," she says. "But you don't wanna talk to them either, not even that... uh... Monster Kid."  
  
"It's fine," you insist, a whine in your voice. You stuff your notebook- margins full, notes blank- in your backpack and mechanically make your way down the halls that are little more to you than routes you memorized on paper. She follows you. "Don't worry about me."  
  
"How can I not? We're friends," she says, and this is news to you.  
  
"You're worrying over nothing."  
  
"I'm worrying over something!"  
  
Your hand itches for a handle belonging to a blade that was never there. Frisk believed in peace above all but you had their body, not their patience. The school doors are several yards ahead still and your patience is an inch long.  
  
"I'm just saying," she says, and her voice is loud, irritatingly loud, "that it's not like you, and you missed all that time in school, and now that you're back you aren't the same, and I kept all those notes for you--"  
  
And you ball your fist, and you release it, and the doors are only two yards away now. The sunlight beckons you with its mocking smile and you bare your own fangs in response.  
  
"-- so look, I just want to know what's wrong, and--"  
  
And nothing. Because you cannot be them anymore, you cannot keep their body ready for an inhabitant that isn't ever returning, and you were happy to help the monsters get to this surface but the Devil would stroll past the pearly gates before you ever let yourself enjoy this nightmare that you so earnestly tried to forget. Your hand raises and she gasps like she knows what's coming, and you bring it down and the sound of smacking flesh reverberates through the cute little hall decorated with cute little drawings on the cute little surface.  
  
The world holds its breath and the only one breathing is her, crying and shaking you but not from anger but shock. Your face stings from where you smacked yourself and it's so much closer to what you're familiar with that it comforts you in a sick way. A red mark is welling up on your cheek- their cheek- and you make up an excuse, push the door open and sprint away.  
  
\---  
  
You're just stealing a chocolate bar out of the fridge when she stops you-- not Toriel but Alphys, chewing her thumb and tapping her foot. "U-um..." she starts. "M-mind if I ask you s-something, Frisk?"  
  
You nod, looking past her to see if she brought her little girlfriend for support or something. But there's nobody, not even Sans, who still looks at you as if he knows you ripped his friends soul and replaced it with black tar and a false smile.  
  
She's adjusting her glasses now, trying to straighten her back. "W-well... a little g-girl and her mom showed up at the door a while a-ago and said something weird happened at school."  
  
But you simply pop a square of chocolate in your mouth, unconcerned, because nothing in this world concerns you anymore. You were meant to be dead and your family has long replaced the family photos of you with the face you have stolen now.  
  
Alphys continues on after a moment, as if she were waiting for a reaction. "Look, I'm... I'm just really worried about you. I-- I feel like it's m-my fault somehow, even though I just found you that way. It's like you aren't the same anymore."  
  
You shrug. "It's me," you say. You don't add: and it will be as long as everyone prefers it this way.  
  
"W-well, look," she says. "You helped me learn that... um, I can be liked for who I really am, even if there's a big secret. So if... there's anything you feel like you can't tell anyone else, you can talk to me."  
  
But it's different, you want to say, because even though she created atrocities, she did it as herself. You've put on their virtues and their sins like a coat and walked far in it despite its ill fit. After all, why freeze outside by shedding it?  
  
You've been quiet for too long, but Frisk was pretty quiet anyway, and she shifts on her feet awkwardly. "O-okay?"    
  
"They deserve better," slip the words from your mouth. You find your arm pointing out the kitchen window and her gaze shifts to outside, where Toriel is sweeping the porch and Asgore is trimming the hedges and Papyrus is waxing his car and Undyne is getting ready to spray him with a hose and Sans is readying a water balloon of his own design from right behind her.  
  
Perhaps she's stunned into silence, because Frisk was never so direct, the personification of 'maybe's and polite listening and thanking people for their kind words. You shove the chocolate wrapper in your pocket and walk smoothly out of the kitchen, at the entrance of which she stands still in shock.  
  
You decide you have to do something before the incident is brought up again.  
  
\---  
  
"Mom, I'm going out," you say.  
  
She smiles as you call her mom, and your eyes go wide but she just ruffles your hair. "Be safe," she says. "I love you."  
  
And wind howls through the hollowness you carved in your chest, and because you cant stand to disappoint her, because she cant lose another child, and maybe because its still a little bit true even for a demon who comes when its name is called, you say you love her too.  
  
\---  
  
It's symbolic, you think as your toes tip over the abyss. You've found through some digging that Frisk was on the surface for three weeks before you were in a coma for three weeks. And now three weeks have passed where you lived their life for the sake of everyone else's happiness, which you will surely ruin now. But ruining things was your second nature, and it was only a matter of time. Better that they think it was an accident than someone else catch on that you've developed a repulsion for butterscotch-cinnamon and spend most of your time in Asgore's flowerbed.  
  
The vine that tripped you the first time has long wilted and died. There's nothing but dead grass around the pit that leads to the Underground now, and perhaps that's symbolic too. Once this area was lush with possibilities, and your stumble on it led to your new family down below. But now there's nothing left except your thoughts and the body that doesn't belong to you, and you wonder how they  felt as they stood on the precipice that you stand on for the second time.  
  
It's better this way. Humanity has stretched its grip across the globe and monsters were spreading fast, but the one area nobody returned to was the Underground. Some people returned once or twice to claim some items, but now it lingered like a nightmare on a sunny morning. It's better that nobody finds the body here. Hurting your parents and Frisk's friends is what you've been trying to avoid all this time. You've left a trail of misleading clues in your wake, all of them point to getting lost or being taken rather than this. Perhaps the only thing out of line would be the note you found in lieu of a diary or an explanation, not in your practiced handwriting but theirs:  _I just want Chara to come back._

A desperate plea or a suicide note? You weren't sure. But you left it in hopes that, if anyone ever finds out the truth, they'll be able to safely blame you and not them for this selfish acct. 

If there's one thing you've learned about history, it's that history erodes everyone into concepts in a textbook and points on a map. The despair of the monsters will be forgotten by time. It sure was when you died.  
  
No, the textbooks of the future won't mention Frisk, the runaway sad child that hit themself and skipped meals and didn't know how to be a human anymore. The child that thought you were the hero, not them. They'll just remember Frisk, the savior.  
  
That's how you comfort yourself as the wind rushes through your hair and the hole in your chest as you plummet down into the abyss.  
  
It's a calculated leap and your careful efforts are rewarded with a sickening crack and several bones piercing through the skin-- exactly what you had hoped for. The world is swimming in black and its going fast, but you cling long enough to hear someone calling their name one last time.  
  
"--risk? Frisk?" they call. "Frisk?"  
  
Finally the flower clears the corner, moving through the dirt slowly rather than burrowing quickly, as if afraid of what it would see. "If this is about the surface, I told you I wasn't going to come no matter--"  
  
"Asriel," you say. Speaking the word sends tremors of pain throughout your body; you simply laugh them off. The next thing you know, his odd beady eyes are across from your own red ones that are the only thing similar to your real body and he's on the verge of tears.  
  
You were never able to fool your brother for long.  
  
"Why? Why?!" is all he's saying. You realize it's rhetorical; you heard it as you died last time, too. You manage to find an arm which responds to your brain's impulses and pat his head.

You weren't the greatest person, you think, and you couldn't even pretend to be them for a month.   
  
"I didn't get to say goodbye too." But this is all you manage before the familiar darkness snuffs out the flame of determination inside you. You would never be sure if a human soul shattered that day, if you even had one anymore or if it was theirs; after all, soul was essence and their essence was completely absent. The only thing you recall as you slip into the void is your brother holding your mangled body close, as if carrying you in two arms, and the tufts of white fur and distant laughter that swallow your body like the ocean would a ship that wrecked long ago. 


End file.
